Vanquish Pro 1.135 By Cade Metz February 17, 2004

• Product: Vanquish Pro 1.135
• Direct Price: $24.95 direct
• Company Info: Vanquish, www.vanquish.com

Editor Rating:

Vanquish Pro 1.135 adds a new twist to the whitelisting paradigm. While it offers reasonable whitelisting capabilities (though not as good as Qurb's), it doesn't require senders to be on your list to mail you, nor do they have to answer challenges. Instead, they can reach you by putting up a bond with Vanquish's developers, a small guarantee that they won't spam you.

If bonded senders spam you, you can penalize them by deducting money from their bonds. Only five cents is deducted per message (which goes not to you but to your ISP, providing insurance against reporting legitimate mail as spam to collect the bond), but for high-volume spammers this could add up quickly. Vanquish is so new, however, that only a handful of users are bonded (Vanquish puts up a bond for all new users), and it's unknown whether nonusers will freely post their own bonds.

Most whitelists can accidentally block responses when, for example, a message sent to a help desk gets a response from an individual who isn't on the sender's whitelist. Vanquish's SmartSubject can watch for mail with subjects matching recently sent items and let them through. Whitelists also tend to block confirmation e-mails from shopping sites. Vanquish's SurfWatch logs visits to such sites and temporarily allows their e-mails through.

On the other hand, the app doesn't have a true quarantine folder: You can view a list of messages from unknown senders who have yet to respond to challenges, but you can't open the messages on the list. You can see only sender addresses and subject lines. And the list is inconveniently located. But Vanquish is easy to set up and reasonably adept at building accurate whitelists. Ultimately, Vanquish's usefulness depends on broad adoption.